Chapter Five

Push and pull technologies are something we quite literally use on a daily basis, even if we aren’t thinking about it in the moment: you send a text to your friend, who reads it, reacts, and sends one back; that’s a very common form of this methodology, but what are some other applications? Gathering form information to join a website, tuning into your favorite YouTube channel, searching for local dentists—quite literally almost anything you do involving the internet requires a push or a pull. Interactions spark the need for these technologies to exist, which is pretty much just a modernized version of a letter through the mail or a door-to-door salesperson, which is why both of these forms kind of became obsolete. Thankfully for the USPS, mail is always useful, but we creep closer every day to pretty much going totally digital.

With that in mind, is it really better that we’re relying more on this digital instant gratification? The upside is pretty evident considering how much easier it is to gather information and share ideas with anyone across the world, but what about the consequences? What if the internet faces a global blackout? Even if it’s just a few minutes, that could be catastrophic in so many aspects of life; would traffic lights stop signaling properly? What about air traffic control if their frequencies just stopped working? It’s a beautiful thing, but there’s a reason we haven’t fully committed to going “all digital”.